This paper deals with the Set Covering with Pairs Problem (SCPP). This problem is a generalization of the Set Covering Problem (SCP), which is known to be NP-hard. The difference between both problems is that, in the SCPP, one element of the universe is admitted to be covered if there are at least two specific objects chosen to cover it. In this context, three constructive heuristics, one local...

The pancake puzzle is a classic optimization problem that has become a standard benchmark for heuristic search algorithms. In this paper, we provide full proofs regarding the local search topology of the gap heuristic for the pancake puzzle. First, we show that in any non-goal state in which there is no move that will decrease the number of gaps, there is a move that will keep the number of gap...

Automated high school timetabling is a challenging task. This problem is a well known hard computational problem which has been of interest to practitioners as well as researchers. High schools need to timetable their regular activities once per year, or even more frequently. The exact solvers may fail to find a solution for a given instance of the problem. A selection hyper-heuristic can be de...

Point matching is the task of finding correspondences between two sets of points such that the two sets of points are aligned with each other. Pure point matching uses only the location of the points to constrain the problem. This is a problem with broad practical applications, but it has only been well studied when the geometric transformation relating the two point sets is of a relatively low...

Hybrid search methods synthesize desirable aspects of both constructive and local search methods. Constructive methods are systematic and complete, but exhibit poor performance on large problems because bad decisions made early in the search persist for exponentially long times. In contrast, stochastic local search methods are immune to the tyranny of early mistakes. Local search methods replac...

In this paper, the main known exact and heuristic solution approaches and algorithms for the symmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), published after 1992, are surveyed. The paper categorize the most important existing algorithm to 6 main groups: i) Genetic algorithms, ii) Ant colony methods, iii) Neural Methods, iv) Local search algorithms and Tabu search, v) Lagrangian methods and vi) Bran...

This paper examines the factors affecting the quality of solution found by meta-heuristic search when optimising object-oriented software class models. From the algorithmic perspective, we examine the effect of encoding, choice of components such as the global search heuristic, and various means of incorporating problemand instance-specific information. We also consider the effect of problem ch...

Real-time heuristic search methods are used by situated agents in applications that require the amount of planning per move to be independent of the problem size. Such agents plan only a few actions at a time in a local search space and avoid getting trapped in local minima by improving their heuristic function over time. We extend a wide class of real-time search algorithms with automatically-...

Real-time heuristic search methods are used by situated agents in applications that require the amount of planning per move to be independent of the problem size. Such agents plan only a few actions in a local search space and avoid getting trapped in local minima by improving their heuristic function over time. We extend a wide class of real-time search algorithms with automatically built stat...